#TumblrPurge

[cfiesler]

I have talked to four journalists today and have agreed to write a press piece that I need to start on, but obviously it’s important that I finally sit down and post on Tumblr, too.

This is a weird feeling: I literally think that I am the world’s foremost effort on the potential impact of Tumblr banning adult content.

Here’s why: I’ve done a bunch of research about the genesis of AO3/OTW, and most recently, a large-scale study of fandom’s migration across platforms over time. I can tell you for a fact that both fanfiction.net’s and LiveJournal’s bans on adult content resulted in fans leaving those sites--and in LiveJournal’s case, essentially the death of that platform for fandom. 

The image above, if you haven’t seen it before, shows fandom platform use over time, and the red line that dips drastically is LiveJournal, after “Strikethrough 2007.”

Here’s another finding from that study: That policy was the #1 reason that fans left LiveJournal. For every other platform, fans mostly left because something better came along, but nope, for LiveJournal, it was specifically because of their crackdown on “obscene” content, and what that signaled to fandom about how they were unwelcome there.

I’m going to be posting more about this in the coming days, so watch this space, but here’s my tweetstorm from today, here’s a CNN article I’m quoted in, and here’s another Tumblr post with an optimistic view. As I wrote recently in a TWC piece about how I see the future of fandom, “fandom is not helpless to external forces—to platforms, industries, or even policies.” I believe that.

If history repeats itself, then Tumblr might fall as LiveJournal did - but something better might come to take its place. 

[freedom-of-fanfic]

"Same-sex romantic content will be far more likely to be remove" meaning the art of Steven Universe of the gems and content in general will it be removed and content from the new She-ra, which both shows does have lbgt and queer themes in them?

this won’t be official policy or anything but it will probably be the aggregate effect, yes.

why does this happen, you ask?

because the site rules are enforced by humans, and humans ... are not very good at being 100% fair or unbiased. (at least, not when we're acting in large numbers. any one person could be good at it, but the likelihood that most of a group is good at fairness drops as the group gets bigger.)

thus, Even when we're trying to be unbiased:

material that's potentially in violation of the tumblr TOS featuring subjects that are not 'default' (NOT straight, cis, perisex, white, able-bodied, healthy, etc) have a greater chance of being noticed and reported. it's more 'visible' because of a combined effect of 'this might be a violation' and the brain's increased awareness when something is 'out of the ordinary'. if straight-cis-white is 'ordinary': things that aren't straight-cis-white grab our attention, and are that much more likely to be scrutinized for violations of the TOS. (see: fandom's tendency to go after media that isn't mediocre whitebread content for failing to be 'good enough'.)

this is severely compounded by:

 a lack of internal awareness of privilege/bias/etc amongst those who hold the majority opinion. (it's the majority opinion because the majority holds that opinion.) if the majority is biased against something, that thing is more likely to get reported as a problem by people who don't even acknowledge that they're biased against it.

not to mention:

people who will participate in deliberately biased & malicious reporting. there's plenty of people who are openly racist, openly homophobes, openly transphobes, etc. you think they won't take special time to go after TOS violations from content that they openly loathe? because they do - and they will continue to do so.

why this happens in America/on American platforms in particular:

at the admin level: in America, the higher up the management ladder you go, the more likely the people making the decisions are straight white cis guys who do not have a strong awareness of their own privilege and/or bias against people who don't share their privilege.  These are the people who will be responsible for writing & enforcing the rules for nsfw content at Oath and/or Tumblr. they are likely to be unconsciously biased towards content that they personally like and against content they personally don't like, so in aggregate, their decisions will be more likely to favor straight white cis guy tastes & enjoyments.

at the cultural level: America is obsessive about keeping sexual content from 'the children' than violent content, because our cultural values are very much rooted in puritanial Christian morality. We also still have a lot of racism, homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, sexism, etc. baked directly into our culture. so if something can be concievably argued as a threat to preserving the innocence/sexual ignorance of a puritanical, white Christian kid, then it has much higher potential to be flagged as n sfw. (of course, this means LGBTQ+ content (romantic or otherwise) and non-white content is more likely to be tagged as in violation of the TOS.)

tl;dr: even if every single person moderating tumblr was acting with the best intentions, trying to be 100% fair and reporting/acting without bias, the drift will be towards creating a sexually chaste, LGBTQ+-unfriendly, white-centric, and cis-bodied/perisex only space as everything else gets reported more often as a problem and purged off the site.

that's why censorship enforces baked-in privilege in brief, folx.

[good-am]

I noticed Tumblr hasn't deleted a single nsfw thing. Literally only completely sfw posts/blogs. peoples creations they poured their heart and soul into are being deleted because Tumblr just hates it's users. It's stupid algorithms or whatever is just deleting whatever it comes across. Not porn, not Nazis, but fucking peanut butter baby gets flagged.

[yukipri]

So I’m back from the dead (literally). A Goodbye Message.

Hey there. Some of you may remember me.

Some of you may have wondered why I suddenly stopped posting, but the vast majority of you probably didn’t even notice, as is how it is. ^ ^;

I’m finally back, and it wasn’t an easy journey getting back.

Here’s what happened.

(Slightly long post, but please forgive me for not putting it under a cut, it’s sorta important)

On November 19th, I checked my blog as I always do, to learn that my blog was terminated.

No warning, no reason, suddenly BOOM gone. I’ve had this blog since spring 2012. It’s almost entirely sfw, I’ve always been hyper careful with tagging, and any questionable content has always been hosted on other platforms. Yet for some reason, I was one of many blogs caught up in what’s come to be known as the #TumblrPurge.

I followed all the steps. I emailed staff, first desperately, then more rationally, making my case. I figured that a bot had caught my blog, as I knew plenty of other more suspicious content blogs that were unharmed. At first there was hope, it’s just a glitch, it’s happening to a lot of people, they’ll give it back right away, some people have already gotten theirs back!

Nothing.

My methods of contacting followers were limited to my Patreon and Twitter, neither of which has much of a base. Followers who knew me on there were incredibly kind and supportive, and sometimes even reached out to staff on my behalf.

I didn’t want to spam, but I also was desperate. I emailed staff once a week. I tried using different categories. I tried adding attachments. My messages ranged from simple and succinct, to deeply personal and desperate.

I was honestly devastated. I spiraled into the worst depression I’ve ever been in. I could barely eat and vomited nonstop for a week. I gained 20 pounds in 2 weeks. I was completely out of control mentally, and even reached out to a psychiatrist friend in case I couldn’t handle it myself. I couldn’t draw, and thinking about projects that I once loved only hurt me more.

Talk about social media addiction, but I’ve legit never gone longer than a week without posting something for years, and especially since becoming a content creator, it felt sickening to not have the place where I drove myself to post constantly and consistently. It broke my schedule. It made me feel cut off from the world, and I felt claustrophobic and uncomfortable in my own skin.

I lost so many things with this blog. Yes, I was primarily a content creator, and while of course I had backups of all my art and some of my longer text posts, I lost so much more.

I lost, perhaps most importantly, all my interactions with my followers. I lost connections to so many people, people I hadn’t contacted in years and may not have even been active anymore, but who I always believed I would have this route back to. I lost memories, both online and of my personal life that I had recorded on here.

And as someone who unfortunately put so much of my identity and self-validation on my social media experience, I suddenly felt like I was absolutely nothing.

For the longest time, I thought I was su*cidal as a result of my depression (word bleeped out bc who knows what can get you flagged now). I certainly thought about death and dying daily.

But then, I realized what I was feeling wasn’t quite that. I didn’t feel like I wanted to die.

I felt like I was already dead.

Which, may sound like an exaggeration, but in terms of tumblr at least, it’s exactly the same. If I had died in rl, I would have dropped off the map, just like this. Suddenly stopped posting, no warning in advance. My blog may have existed, but in this case, no record of my existence even remained. To people who came looking for my url, I may as well have been dead. You wouldn’t have known any better.

Or who knows, maybe I was a criminal or had done something awful that resulted in my blog being removed. Maybe I had just had it with this site and had chosen to leave. Maybe I was just taking a much needed break. It would have been odd, since I prioritized communicating and always said when I needed a break, which was rarely ever. But either way, I had no way of telling any of you what had happened to me. My voice was gone.

Feeling like I was dead, after I recognized what I was feeling, was...disturbing, I guess. Kinda explained why I always felt like a corpse though.

(of course, feeling like I was dead contributed to thinking other things like maybe it’d be better if I really wasn’t around at all, but that’s a result, and not the main feeling.)

Anyway, I kept emailing staff, and I finally managed to come back. It took ten emails and over 2 months of waiting and wasting away and trying to come to terms with how I’m unlikely to get it back. I didn’t get my blog back until TODAY.

Now that I have come back, the landscape’s changed, as I had heard it had. They hadn’t even announced the adu*t content policy change when they terminated me. I honestly feel like I’m back in a world that’s moved on without me, and it’s made me feel very strongly how insignificant I was in the first place.

During my time being dead, I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do. I regretted not doing my 25K follower giveaway sooner. I regretted not getting this or that content out. I regretted having kept certain long text posts and ask responses in my drafts yet unpublished.

But more than anything, I regretted not being able to say goodbye, and thank you all for my time here.

Yes, it’s had ups and downs, but tumblr was where I first found myself as an artist. Tumblr was what first made me interact with and find a group of people interested in what I created. Tumblr was where I was able to interact with those people, you. And I know I’ve had my ups and downs too, and different fandoms and different moods, but I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for letting me be a part of your experience here, however big or small that experience may have been.

I also learned the dangers of immersing myself too deeply on one online platform. So much of myself had been poured into this one blog, this one blog that can disappear with a legit snap of staff’s fingers. (my twitter handle was “Got Thanos’d on Tumblr” for a good month lol) I used to think that’s what made my content valuable, that I poured so much love and thought and everything personal into it, that’s what made it special, but in the end oh so very damaging when it was ripped away. As someone who spent almost all my time online creating content, it was an awful reality pill I had to swallow, and I don’t want ANYONE experiencing the same thing I did.

So please. The takeaway here, if I can be a cautionary tale, is to be aware that an online identity is more unstable than you think it is. It can go POOF. I’m lucky to be here, and that staff finally responded, and that I had the masochism to continue emailing staff weekly no matter how much I felt like I should stop breathing afterwards.

Also, please, if you have people on this site you care about, whether it be a friend or someone you think is neat, anyone you will miss if they suddenly disappeared, please go connect with them in other places beyond this site, which may become increasingly unstable. This can be another social media if they have it, an email, a chatting platform, anything. Even if you personally don’t use it yet, create an account so you can find them when you can no longer access your account, or they can’t access theirs and they can find you. Don’t regret it like I did.

As for me, after all of this, I don’t know if I can post content on here again.

I’d gone well beyond hoping for another chance at this community. All I’ve been thinking about these past two months was how I would have wanted to say goodbye.

Now that I have my account back, I’m currently filled with more numbness and bitterness than any joy or relief. I don’t know if I can create content anymore for a platform that has hurt me so deeply, no matter how much its community means to me. This experience changed me, and I’ve taken damage that isn’t going to go away so easily.

As I think about what to do moving forward, for now, you can find me on my accounts that I WAS active on these past two months. They aren’t the same, but they were all I had.

If you read this message until the end, thank you.

Again, I might decide to post on here again. I might not. But for now, here’s again what I’ve been wanting to say for two months:

Thank you, Tumblr. And goodbye.

-Kazu

(yukipri.tumblr.com)

https://twitter.com/YukiPri_Art

https://www.patreon.com/YukiPri

[contac]

Downtown New Orleans knows what's up.

[zedrin-maybe]

Can you imagine having Tumblr on your resume at this point?

“Yeah I worked on a site that wound up with a huge child pornography and pornography bot problem that we didn’t address, deleted legitimate users in an attempt to get rid of them without success, managed to give a platform to nazis and white nationalists, and effectively killed the website.”

[17decemberarchive-blog]

This is how the Archive Team is going to save Tumblr (and you can help us)

There is a website in trouble like Tumblr

We have hundreds of warriors machines, which run a special operating system made for archiving the web.

There is a tracker which is a central ToDo list worked on by each warrior. The warriors keep the files for archiving only for a moment before they hand them to the staging servers.

The staging server collect and process the data into huge .warc files which are accepted by archive.org

archive.org process and indexed our .warc files and makes them available in the wayback machine. It takes care of the long term hosting. Each TB stored costs somewhere between 1500$ and 2000$ in the long run. 

Our minimum how much we will save is above 60 TBs. An estimate of the total size of the NSFW part of tumblr alone is 10-20 times that. Even when we will archive only a fraction it is going to be expensive.  When you donate to archive.org today. Your donation will be matched.

You can help the Archive Team (which is not related to the nice guys at archive.org) by filling out this https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdoYnlweKF-5iQ2G0FB9s7pDV_Le61dDU-gMMDsc8CQ50YBjQ/viewform?hl=en form  which is used to built the ToDo list stored by the tracker. We are looking for endangered blogs like NSFW blogs for example. If you know any that you would be sad be to loose please add them to the list. That way they will be saved.

Please share.

[elemental-draws]

I know this is happening to everyone

But I just thought I'd point out more of the bullshittery going on. These two screenshots are from my side blog, and as you can see, they've been flagged for absolutely no reason. Theyre both reblogs. One is just kinda a vent thing and the other is an art reference. Niether are fuckin "adult content". Idk which concerns me more. The one that mostly just text or the one that is only an art reference, and the fact that nudity is natural in art yet here we are. Even if it was adult content it shouldn't be fuckin penalized. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Tumblr, your shooting urself in the foot here, but I highly doubt you even know it.

@staff

[kingofcheeze]

@staff

[captain-vrisrezi]

[tristikovart]

If your posts are all out of order after being flagged and restored

Editing and saving the post without actually changing anything seems to return it to its original place in your blog.

Not the biggest problem most of the time, but I was worried that if the Avania comic got flagged it would mess up the comic pagination. Still annoyed that 94 posts of mine got flagged incorrectly and now I have to go back through them again to fix the order, but better than no fix at all...

In other news, I sent Pillowfort $5 and I’m looking forward to using their communities feature!

[xstumbl]

We’re Opened!

Whew!! It has been a tough and stressful past few days to get everything in order to show you what we’ve been working on with Xstumbl.com

Our programmer has finished the beta version of the site. We wanted to focus on basic functionality to get the site opened. We are aware that there are some minor bugs, but those will be addressed this week. For now, please register then login and begin posting some content to fill up our great site. We encourage you to express yourself through your creative posts. We allow all kinds of pussy, whether its your own or just pictures of your cat.

Unlike the other guys who begged for money and claimed to have something, they have nothing ready. We didn’t ask for any donations and we have a working beta version for all of you!

Please enjoy our website and we want to thank all of you for your support while we worked hard to deliver for all of you

[showaridershenshin]

For a giggle, I present to you all my spicy explicit posts that have been flagged by tumblr!

Thank goodness tumblr is banning this horribly nsfw content!

[armthearmour]

The Purge

I’m going to refrain from making predictions about what’s going to happen with this Tumblr wide dilemma. That being said, I know this is already driving a lot of people off of the site, people that I’m sad to see go, so here’s to them.

I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that I have an arm_the_armour Instagram, which you can find here. I have every intention of sticking this out and watching what happens, but you never know, and it never hurts to be safe.

Here’s a picture of a pretty Smallsword, attributed to Jeffries & Jones, England, ca. 1799, housed at the National Museum of Scotland, just for fun.

[contac]

Flagged as adult, appealed and denied. It’s a pair of legs, you stupid motherfuckers.

Well, let’s do it this way then.

[zedrin-maybe]

Artists you should follow (elsewhere)

Tumblr’s recent fuckup really highlighted how fragile this site’s become. Accounts are still being knocked down.

A few of my friends had their accounts purged. Some got them back, others still have yet to hear a peep from their support tickets, some on this list have yet to be affected (myself included). In either case, I’ve made this list to try and direct people to where to find them now, whether or not they’re still on tumblr.

This won’t be an exhaustive list of everyone but I’ll likely add to it as time goes on (provided my account stays up).

My own: https://twitter.com/Zedrinbot (sfw) https://twitter.com/Zedrinbutt (nsfw)

Herny: https://twitter.com/HernyEd (sfw)

Dabble: https://twitter.com/DabbleDoodles (nsfw)

Nephrited: https://twitter.com/Nephrited (sfw)

Neayix: https://twitter.com/Neayix (nsfw)

Colorwrath:  https://twitter.com/ColorWrathArt (nsfw) https://colorwrath.newgrounds.com/

Snowyfeline: https://twitter.com/snowy_Feline (nsfw)

Mas: https://twitter.com/Mastahopo (sfw)

Cam: https://twitter.com/perplexedart (sfw)

Ceci: https://twitter.com/CeciCaptain (sfw)

Mighty: https://twitter.com/mightynsfw (nsfw)

CoffeeSlice: https://twitter.com/CaffeineCuts (nsfw)